Welcome to my astronomy blog, I dedicate myself to the simplest form of amateur astronomy which requires only portable equipments.

Monday, January 31, 2005

5-Feb-2003: East Dam, High Island Reservoir

It's hard to have clear sky during long holidays, but this is an except today!

We gathered at 5:30p in Sai Kung and hire a taxi to go directly to the east dam, since the east dam is a restricted area, one cannot go there by other transportation. The sky was very clear all day until around 5:00p, the sky was 90% covered. We go there without hesitation however.

Arrived, we took some shots around. East dam is a very nice place, not only for stargazing but also for sight-seeing. I ate my cup noodle anyway, it was my first time to east cup noddle, I remember to take hot water but I forgot to bring a fork... oops... index finger was used. After taking the noodle, the sky cleared!

We observed a lot of things. Many deep sky objects were nake eye objects! This is probably the first time I saw and pointed my Ranger to M31. No problem. All of us found that there were so many stars under the big dog (cannis major), we didn't realize that before.

It was the first time I found M38 resolvable with my Ranger. Previously I found it was just a faint fuzzy with granularity.

It was the first time I viewed through a Leica 10x50 binoculars. The view was superb, contrasty and super sharpness. It was a bit heavy for a 50mm and the focus travel was limited, the eyecup design was clever and user friendly!

I didn't try to hunt for much new objects, I tried to enjoy instead.

We have briefly polar aligned a spaceboy originally planned to mount a C8 (overload), but the screw does not match (thread size) so it ended up for taking wide field shots with different DC.

Cloud came in around 9:45p, we called the taxi to come back earlier (10:30p originally). When the taxi came, the sky cleared again, but we left anyway.